Chapter 10: Reading Response

    In this chapter we finally begin to conclude our project. I found this chapter to be very informative. It provides a lot of important things to implement while wrapping up the project. This chapter culminates the project experience and celebrates it and makes it a memorable experience for students.
One of the important concepts mentioned in this chapter was reflection. By ensuring that students have time to reflect on their project, you help students reveal things they might not otherwise think about. It helps them reflect on what they learned and what they enjoy about learning. Reflection is acknowledged as being an essential element in learning. This will help students grow as learners and what and how they want to learn in projects ahead. Students need to reflect and elaborate to make the projects successful and can contibute to their greater learning communities and to build connections and share what they learned when they can apply it by elaborating.

    Identities are tied to school traditions. In this chapter, we learn how different traditions give schools an identity such as schools academic-powerhouses, or a school known for it's emphasis on music programs. We can think about ways that our project will establish an identity for our classroom on a smaller-scale in ways that can eventually influence our our school. This give the students and the school a sense and expectation of excellence that they would be held accountable for. Part of creating an identity is to build awareness. In building traditions students will remember their projects for years to come.

   Lastly it's important to celebrate the project with students can feel a sense of accomplishment. Ways to celebrate the project include a showing of student work, put on an event, create a blog, or hold a party. Classroom displays are amongst some of the most common ways to celebrate student's work. Dioramas are a great example of this but putting student work in public places such as the library or even a website. Flickr is a great website for doing just this.

   This chapter was very helpful in laying down the groundwork for the conclusion of a project. The metthods highlighted in this chapter were presented in ways that can make learning memorable and fun for students and could be an important asset for our projects and, of course, our future classroom. The use of a blog was proven to be a great way to celebrate the project and I think that was extremely important to our specifically because we use this tool to communicate with each other and we will be better equipped to use it for celebrating student work or for elaborating.